Health Insurance Issue

[winky2008]

I hired an employee that had insurance coverage through her last employer. She gave her employer two weeks notice and when she terminated her employment there, he cut off her health insurance effective immediately.

I thought that most employers continue the coverage for 30 days and then offer the ex-employee cobra if they want to continue coverage and pay for their own insurance.

We do not offer health insurance, however this employee is getting married in August and will pick-up with her husband.

She needs to see a physician and I was under the impression that her employer should cover her for 30 days.

Please advis

 

[cbg]

Unless you are in Texas, it is up to the insurance plan document when the insurance ends. The law does not require that the employer continue insurance for 30 days. In the almost 30 years I've been administering employee benefit plans, it's been my experience that about 50% of plans end on the last day of employment; the remaining 50% end on the last day of the month in which employment ends.

To the best of my knowledge, only Texas requires that employers continue coverage after the last day of employment, and they only require that it be covered through the end of the month. So if your last day of work is the 1st, you'd get an extra 30 days but if your last day of work is the 31st, you wouldn't get any extra time at all.

Assuming that her former employer's plan requires coverage to end on the last day of employment, which as I said is quite common and quite legal, the employer was perfectly legal.

However, also assuming that her employer had more than 20 employees, she will be eligible for COBRA, which will be retroactive to the day of cancellation. So she won't be uninsured unless she opts out of COBRA.